Quick Thoughts On: Go! Go! Nippon!

Go Go Nippon is a special kind of torture. Writing this, I’ve not quite gotten over the shock of the sheer abomination that is its dialogue, the dryness with which random geographical trivia spills out of its characters mouths, and the painful lengths it goes to pander to its audience.

Arriving from overseas to spend a week in Japan with two almost complete strangers you met in an online chat room, Go Go Nippon greets you by laying all its perverted cards on the table. We meet Makoto, the cheerful, ditzy airhead whose only defining feature are her enormous, perfectly framed breasts and cooking skills so poor her concoctions very nearly kill our protagonist (if only we’d been as lucky).

Then there’s Akira, the bashful would-be-tsundre who exists for the purpose of manufacturing drama when she’s not reciting tourist guides and blushing profusely every time your character speaks. And what a character are globetrotting protagonist is, taking seemingly every chance to point out the varying ways Makoto and Akira are and aren’t cute, and missing no opportunity to walk in on them changing and proceeding to engage in lengthy small talk instead of swiftly exiting the room.

The character interactions in Go Go Nippon are so self indulgent and excruciatingly bland that I began to feel real, physical pain at every new line. I’ve never cringed so hard at any piece of media in my life, and now feel it will be weeks before my facial features will be able to recover from the image of pure disbelief and disgust that has been carved into them by this game.

I can’t imagine what sort of person Go Go Nippon is actually for, as it fails at being a history lesson on Japan, a well written drama, or even sufficiently perverted enough to satisfy a crowd looking for that kind of fix. It’s a shallow regurgitation of facts wrapped in excruciating dialogue that goes far enough so as to be immensely uncomfortable and unapologetic in its sexual pandering, but without even a molecule of tastefulness or purepose. Playing it made me hurt. It made me want to scream. It made me feel like I needed a shower. If there’s a universe where this game is worth your time I hope I never find it.

"Quick Thoughts" is a subset of my normal reviews for smaller games which might not fit into a full review but I still have something to say about.